Limelight · BBC Radio 4

The Dentist: Episode 5

March 27, 2026·28 min·2 clips

Paul Rennie threatens to deglove a police officer's face during his arrest.

Paul Rennie is not being quietly arrested. The opening scene is all temper, procedural threats, and a search for evidence: blood, gristle, maybe the blanket. Nobody has the room under control. Authority tries to sound official. Rennie answers with panic, bluster, and oddly practical worries about trousers. Everything keeps circling back to the blanket, because it looks like the small thing that could turn a shouting match into a prison sentence measured in decades. Then Kerry and Gasha start talking escape. Collect Sapphire from school. Pack the car. Keep moving and hope the future plays along. Kerry can see how thin that plan is. Handing herself in starts to sound less impossible than dragging the damage down the road. Gasha will not let the collapse happen. He says the deadline has moved and the evidence tying them to Ronald Goodman is burned. That comfort barely gets a breath. Kerry has told Bob everything, and Bob is suddenly missing, which makes Gasha's reassurance worse each time he offers it. She keeps pushing. He finally gives. His idea of protection means Bob has been dealt with for good. The comedy goes sour fast. Even the line about help being heavy handed lands dry, because the story underneath it has already gone past repair. Ads interrupt the excerpt, but the thread still cuts through: everyone is improvising, and every fix makes the mess larger. This is pressure cooker crime farce, squeezed into a room where domestic panic, legal exposure, and lethal loyalty all talk at once.

As heard by us

A foul-mouthed crime spiral where every joke sits beside a fresh threat.

This episode leans hard into a police confrontation that turns into damage control fast. Evidence comes up, the boot of a car gets searched, and the missing blanket turns into yet another problem.

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Why you'd press play

You want a crime episode where deadpan banter keeps curdling into threats, evidence trouble, and pure panic.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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